01. To Carry The Seeds Of Death Within Me02. Alone All The Way03. The Night Knows No Dawn04. Hail To Thee, Everlasting Pain [feat. Ben Eberle]05. Our Souls Were Clean06. Darkness Surrounds Us

If the online genre police had a physical headquarters somewhere, there'd be at least one picture of The Body slapped up with "wanted" written in capitals above it. Most of the time they've had at least one of their boots planted firmly in sludge, but on their newest work, I Shall Die Here, said boot and said (the) body along with it have schlocked out of said sludge and begun floating about toward the exosphere, dripping with its remaining slime above the clouds.

It's a collaboration with The Haxan Cloak, an electronic project by a guy called Bobby known for its ominous atmospheres and punishing, droning death-fixations. The collaboration makes sense. The Body's sound has been occupying a similar ground for a good bit of time now, stomping about, sounding the way I assume getting bled out and dying slowly feels. Massive sludgy doom riffs and savage poundings from the drums get coupled with falsetto vocals that sound, for better or worse, like the wailings of some tortured, not-quite-human animal. Their sound is robust but fairly airy, qualities that have been amplified by The Haxan Cloak here.

From the start, there's no dicking around on this; nothing's there to hold your hand before you plunge into the sonic gloom that this album solely consists of. I Shall Die Here sounds like the realization that you're going to die here, wherever here might be, would feel like. It's vaguely sublime aural dread, and that's awesome sometimes.

The Haxan Cloak's discs are devoid of anything that could even briefly be mistaken for cheeriness, but they're not a drain to listen to. They reward you for hearing them; they're eerily beautiful. Same for most of The Body's output, maybe substituting "beauty" in most cases with metallic anger. This manages to mix the more grueling and punishing aspects of the two, while remaining strangely pretty.

It all reminds me of some slightly pretentious quote by some guy I can't remember though: roughly, "all good art will make you happy," or at least it's supposed to. Not because its subject is happy or its story is happy or its melodies are sunny or colorful or anything, but because it makes you appreciate something you hadn't appreciated before. It should be exhilarating. This thing here, on the other hand, is maybe just a tad too depleting in the end. It pounds you down, pounds you down some more, then buries you. It's brutal and bleak experimental music and it made me really want to crawl back to some Motörhead when it ended.